The face of a Wood type will often, although not necessarily, show indications of chronic anger or assertiveness. These may be two vertical lines between the eyebrows, tension of the lower eyelid and a tense jaw.
The eyes are the sense organ associated with Wood. Sometimes the eyes of a Wood type can have a hesitant quality, not quite looking at you and coming and going. Often, however, the Wood type’s eyes are quite intense. They may almost be fierce, indicating some held-in anger, but they may just be very direct in the way they look.
Some Wood types have a body characteristic of compression or having been squeezed. This has probably resulted from holding in anger. If we imagine squeezing ourselves inwards or holding ourselves back it will make our body appear to be ‘packed in’ or compressed. Wood types may also look tense and have a tight musculature. Hilary told us:
When I get frustrated I often feel tense under my ribs and also in my neck and shoulders. At those times I would love a good strong massage to loosen up.
Many Wood types use gestures such as pointing their index fingers, jerky movements or using closed fists. Some less assertive Wood types, however, will have very few gestures.
These observations help us to assess whether someone is a Wood type.
THE EMOTIONAL CAPACITY OF THE WOOD ELEMENT
The Wood Element gives us an overall capacity which strongly affects our emotional life. We can describe this in the following way.
Rules, Structures and Boundaries
Why are rules, structures and boundaries important? They allow us to manifest our ‘Hun’ or overall purpose. They give us a sense of order in our lives. They allow us to unfold our day-to-day and longer-term plans. Without appropriate rules, structure and boundaries our life is not workable.
When a child is born, there are few understood boundaries. If we have watched a young baby who notices its hand in front of its face without knowing whose hand it is, then we can understand that it takes time to develop boundaries.
At a very early age we discover different parts of our body. Later on we find out that our skin is the boundary between the inside and outside world. We also discover that our mothers or primary carers are different from us — we cannot control them in the way we seem to control ourselves.
Later we discover other differences — between others’ toys and my toys, work time and play time, bed room and living room, intimate relationships and professional ones — and thus we discover various social boundaries. The boundaries produce structure and regulate our lives.
Flexible Boundaries and Assertiveness
In general, a good boundary is not air-tight and rigid. Like skin, a boundary should create separation and also allow some movement across it. Boundaries allow us to be both separate individuals as well being part of a partnership or group.
It is not necessary that everyone has the same set of boundaries. Boundaries range widely from that of our skin to, for example, the rules and procedures which govern a country. However, no human grows and develops without boundaries at all.
The capacity created by Wood is sometimes to accept existing rules and boundaries and sometimes to re-negotiate or develop new ones. This allows us to be appropriately assertive and to express ourselves in the external world.
If we have constitutionally imbalanced Wood we may be predisposed to more than our usual share of difficulties to do with rules, structures and boundaries. A healthy Wood Element will allow us to develop rules, structures and boundaries which encourage our growth and development.
EMOTIONS WE EXPERIENCE WHEN THE ABILITY IS IMPAIRED
When the acorn encountered the stone, it simply pushed it out of the way. When we are attempting to get somewhere and we are blocked, we often have an emotional response. We feel frustrated, possibly even angry and then we attempt to deal with the block.
But supposing our Wood Element is weak and our capacity to assert ourselves is less strong than it might be. What happens then? We end up more and more frequently feeling frustrated and unable to push things through to a resolution. Effectively, we experience more:
We’ll talk about each of these in turn.
Frustration is a normal response to being blocked. When our Wood Element is healthy, this frustration leads to adaption, renewed effort, negotiation or creativity. When our Wood Element is weaker, the frustration easily escalates into ineffective anger and difficulty in adapting to existing rules, boundaries and structures — or finding new ones.
Although the emotion associated with Wood is usually labelled ‘anger’, the frustration of natural assertion has many degrees and a rich descriptive vocabulary. We might use words like: frustration, irritation, annoyance, gall, pique, resentment, fury, outrage, indignation, exasperation, rage or wrath to describe the degrees of how we feel. We might use various colloquialisms often implying the addition of heat and weaponry, e.g. ‘blood boiling’, ‘blew my top’, ‘went ballistic’. All these states are a development from basic frustration and there are a great variety of ways to express them.
Here Hilary describes her extremes of anger:
I seem to have fluctuating moods. I can be easily angered or irritated or spontaneously happy as well. My mood changes a lot. When I get angry I feel intensely scrunched up inside and I can feel my mouth crumple up into a ball. Sometimes I feel I want to kill someone or I feel like throwing or smashing something. When it’s gone it’s a contrast and it’s gone completely.
Simon describes a common experience for Wood types; wanting to express, but pulling back from showing the real feelings.
The other day on a bus, the driver was driving like a kamikaze pilot. I wanted to go and say ‘you are driving people you know’ and I kept holding back but wanting to say something. Once I start having a go about something I know I’ll be doing it all the time, so I don’t say anything.
Research shows that getting angry can seriously damage our health. One study found that when people remembered and recounted an incident which made them angry, the pumping efficiency of their hearts dropped on average by 5 per cent. A 7 per cent drop is thought to be potentially dangerous!4